It is an adage of war that if you want to emerge victorious, you must ‘know your enemy,’ but Akbar Ahmed’s The Thistle and The Drone proposes that the Western combatants of the ‘war on terror’ have completely failed to understand who they’ve been fighting for the last decade.

Newt Gingrich is the leading Republican candidate for the 2012 Presidential election. In light of President Obama’s appalling approval rating, there is a decent chance that whoever comes out of the campaign as the Republican candidate could be the next leader of the ‘Free World’.

Glenn Greenwald, citing the work of University of Chicago scholar Robert Pape, describes how it is the United States’ occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as America’s support for tyrannies in the Middle East that have led to an upsurge of terrorism.